The gathering at Moody's house was much less a memorial service and much more a chance for Sirius, and Richard and Audrey, to look back on the difficult choices made during the war and reevaluate how everyone felt about them now, with cooler heads and the benefit of hindsight. There was some mourning as well, remembering the good and the bad of the people on both sides of the war who were now dead at Sirius' hands. Oddly, of the six of them Professor Dumbledore had the most positive things to say about various Death Eaters, having taught the vast majority of them at Hogwarts. Moody, unsurprisingly, was the most negative, with what seemed an encyclopedic knowledge of every violent crime committed during the last nine years and the suspected perpetrators for each. Sirius' and Richard's perspectives were narrower and biased by their personal/familial experiences. Audrey and Ms. Figg were the most neutral - except for Audrey's respect for Rodolphus Lestrange, who had recruited her after getting a copy of her résumé via a contact in the Ministry.
It hurt to talk about the dead Death Eaters and muggles alike as human instead of statistics for a change, but it hurt in a good way, like the sting of picking at a scab. And yet despite that, there was surprising consensus that most of Sirius' activities in the last year were indeed justified. All were agreed the deaths of Ivan Butler, the other muggles Sirius had less intentionally killed over the summer, and even Edgar Bones, Elphias Doge, and Salim Sarwar were necessary evils. They held a moment of silence for lives lost and moved on. Where Sirius regretted Lucius' ultimate fate if not his arrest per se, everyone else laid the blame for the wizard's madness squarely at Abraxas Malfoy's door. Where Sirius questioned his decision to escalate muggle-baiting to mass breaches of the Statute of Secrecy, Richard was able to talk Moody and even Ms. Figg around to his point of view - that Sirius or at least Richard would probably have been murdered by Voldemort sometime in September-October if they hadn't impressed the Dark Lord so well, their only error being too successful on the first attempt. Ms. Figg went so far as to say Audrey's security measures for each of the operations she was involved in (barring the one with Inferi that Voldemort himself planned) left the Ministry and Order both to shame when it came to saving muggle lives. While Moody and Dumbledore had been vexed when Sirius killed Rabastan, Abraxas, and Greengrass without consulting them ahead of time, mostly because of the headaches it caused everyone, Ms. Figg was completely on his side for all three. Ms. Figg even berated Dumbledore's leadership for not giving Sirius any kind of guidelines as to what kind of targeting might have been "acceptable," a sentiment Audrey and Richard agreed with once explained the context of the murders. The Ravenclaw and Slytherin said they wouldn't condone the murders even had they been on the other side of the war at the time, but they knew Sirius far better than Dumbledore, understood why he had done what he did, and easily criticized Dumbledore's noble short-sightedness.
The only points everyone agreed things really should have gone differently were Sirius' decision to go back on Christmas without coordinating with anyone, the killing of Lord Greengrass (since it led to the execution of the man's wife and child in retribution and put Sirius at risk without meaningfully affecting the war effort), and his unilateral decision to kill Voldemort (since that would have been disastrous if Orion Black hadn't been on hand with a copy of The Complete Works of Ekrizdis).
Sirius left the gathering feeling calm, pensive and yet unsatisfied. Part of him obviously appreciated the reassurance that his actions weren't mere symptoms of a depraved mind, but another part of him stewed on a disturbing realization: his disgust at himself and his actions was not actually the same as regret. Although he mourned and definitely resented the "necessary evil" killings, he didn't regret them, not really, because he would do them again. He didn't regret murdering Greengrass or Abraxas or Rabastan. He did regret what happened to Lucius, despite everyone else agreeing the ambush that caught him was one of the best-thought-out and objectively moral things Sirius had done in the war. He regretted using Bella and Rodolphus as he had in the end. He even regretted what he had done to Felix Mulciber and Evan Rosier, albeit to lesser degrees and mostly because he'd watched Richard swiping away tears when the group was talking about what happened to those two.
Yes. Sirius was a selfish bastard. The only crimes he felt genuinely remorseful for were the ones that hurt himself and/or his friends and family. If given the chance to go back in time and try again, the muggles, the various Order members, Greengrass and the other victims would still be dead, but he would have found a way to save Lucius from Azkaban. He would have restrained Bella before she could murder her husband in shock and then forced them both into hiding or something. Rodolphus could see reason and would have managed Bella, surely. He would have kept Richard's good friend and favorite cousin alive. He had no idea how he would have done these things, but that didn't change the sentiment.
He was still thinking about it all when he returned to find the Potter house empty. He suddenly remembered that everyone was out at the rehearsal dinner for Lily's sister's wedding. He had told James he would be out with Richard for far longer. He shrugged and helped himself to a large serving of ice cream in the kitchen. He didn't feel like real food. He sat at the breakfast table and stabbed his spoon into the cream moodily. Then he changed his mind and got up to raid the liquor cabinet too. He sprinkled whiskey over the bowl of ice cream for flavor and poured a generous shot to drink. And left the bottle on the table for seconds.
He was fairly confident the drink in his hand was still only his second when Severus Snape let himself into the kitchen sometime after sunset.
The look Snape gave him was artlessly judgmental. "You know, while it's not strictly prohibited to combine your current potions regimen with alcohol, I haven't actually looked into whether that holds true at blood concentrations above, say, 0.1%."
"'M nah drunk," Sirius countered. He was instantly mortified to hear himself slurring his words. He didn't do that. He could hold his liquor! He grimaced and snatched up the whiskey bottle again to squint at the label. "Quintin Black... shit, thought this's Ogden's."
Snape smirked at him and set down his various potions vials. "How unfortunate. For you. The hangover with Quintin is much, much worse than Ogden's Old. It's chemically proven. And given its brewing process, there's definitely too many copper-containing compounds to risk combining it with the Confectio Alchemes."
"Eh. Jus' skip it."
"Inadvisable." Snape picked up the nearly empty bottle and corked it. "Sit still and don't do anything stupid while I figure out a workaround." He pulled out a notebook and fountain pen and started scribbling equations. It was damn impressive how Snape never had to cross out or vanish and redo any of his work.
"Y'really good a'that," he said after awhile, still watching the pen move back and forth across the page hypnotically.
Snape ignored him. Sirius summoned the rest of the ice cream from the ice box. "Wan' some?" he offered.
"Words cannot express how disinclined I am to prolong my suffering this evening by taking a break to eat ice cream with you."
"Suit y'self." He scraped it all into his bowl. "Y'know, I find people I hate more tollery- tolab- tolerable with th' libral application of ice cream an' booze."
"You're an ape."
"N'uh. Dog."
"Morgana save me." That last was a barely audible hiss. Snape capped his pen and aggressively thrust it back in his pocket. He got up and rummaged about in the kitchen cabinets, returning with Euphemia's home healing kit. A swish of his wand, and a medium-sized cauldron from the lab floated into the room, which he filled with pure water from his wand. He measured in some ordinary salt, dried hot pepper, and some tea leaves and swirled the mixture with a silver spoon from Euphemia's fancy set. He then used an eyedropper from the healing kit to add two drops each of the Quintin Black liquor, Pepperup, Sobering Solution, and one of the specialty brews he had brought for Sirius.
"Isn' the usual dose of Pepp'rup and Sobering Solution abou'... fiffy times that?"
"It is." He pushed the whole cauldron across the table and conjured a straw in it. "But we're practicing homeopathy tonight. Drink."
"Th' whole thing? 'S bigger than my head!"
"Oh, no, your head is considerably bigger than this," Snape returned.
"Wazzit gonna do?"
"Make you sweat out all that alcohol and byproducts over the next hour or so. You'll need all the fluids and salt to replace what you're losing anyway. And then you can take your actual medicine."
Sirius eyed the cauldron distastefully but eventually grabbed the straw and lowered his head to drink. Sirius' potions doses were smaller than they used to be, and he only took them at night now, but he was stuck with this regimen for the whole rest of the year already. Everyone had said it would be longer if he skipped doses and had some kind of relapse.
Snape's concoction didn't taste great: saltwater with a side of burning the tongue. It started working right away, though. He could feel sweat break out across his forehead after the first few sips. He wiped his face with his sleeve and frowned at the dirty greenish stain it left. Odd. The potion wasn't green. "Wha's with th-"
"Copper," Snape answered shortly. He was inspecting his nails now.
Sirius grimaced as the elbow crease in his light gray sleeve darkened and turned green too. "Well. Tha's gross."
"Your fault for drinking that shit."
"You couldn't've done something diffrent? Had to be sweat?"
"Would you prefer to lock yourself in the toilet for the next hour, urinating every five minutes?"
..."Nah, thi's good."
"Thought so."
After fifteen minutes, Sirius was feeling less drunk, more alert, very disgusting, and quite bored. His eyes flicked up to Snape's irritatingly satisfied face. He was leaned back, eyes closed, fingers drumming against his stomach. "Let's play a game."
"No."
"C'mon. You'll like it."
"I highly doubt that."
"It's called What Would James Do."
"Egad. Worse than I thought. I liked you better with more severe cognitive impairment."
"Here's the scenario," Sirius bouldered on, as if Snape hadn't spoken. "You're a spy in the Death Eaters. It's early days. You've no rank yet, haven't even met the Dark Lord, don't have a Mark. Your mentor brings you a muggle and tells you to demonstrate various curses on him, finishing with a killing curse."
Snape's eyes flew open and glared at him. "What exactly are you playing at, asking me?"
Sirius shrugged. "You're not looking for excuses to excuse me, and James says he's my... what's the word for representing someone else? Legally?"
"Barrister? Proxy? Surrogate?"
"That. James says he's my surrogate conscience for when I'm tempted to kill people and stuff."
"Brilliant. Is that a frequent problem? If so, I can give you some poison to take instead of medicine."
"Not anymore. James is paranoid. Anyway, what would James do?"
Snape scowled before abruptly snatching up the Quintin's and serving himself a single shot in a conjured glass before banishing the bottle back to the cabinet. He downed the dark liquid and vanished the cup again. "Well... I assume the muggle is doomed regardless. If James doesn't obey orders, the muggle still dies, and he'll probably be punished. Maybe killed. So, assuming he wants to keep being a spy, he should cast the curses to the best of his ability and say he hasn't mastered the killing curse yet."
"You think the killing curse is that different from, say, Entrails Expelling?"
"No, but we both know James Potter of the Pristine Principles from His Perspective does, and you said what would James do."
"What do you think if it was a cat instead of a muggle?" Sirius asked curiously. "Bella started me on animals, so it'd be hard to lie and say I hadn't mastered the curse even if I wanted to." Sirius realized rather too late he had just admitted to practicing Dark magic on kittens. But then, there was a reason he wasn't having this conversation with the real James.
"Charming." Snape pursed his lips in thought. "I think Potter could probably talk himself into casting the Avada on an animal. He doesn't actually care about hurting creatures he sees as lesser than himself, so long as he can convince himself it doesn't damage his own self-image."
Sirius blinked. "That's a little harsh."
"No, it isn't. You and he both were perfectly happy to come after me for seven years of schooling because I was poor, visually unappealing, different, antisocial, and a Slytherin. Had you forgotten?"
"Oh... that's... valid, actually."
Snape spread his arms dramatically.
"I should probably apologize for all that, not just the almost killing you part."
Snape snorted. "Well spotted. So civilized!"
"Sorry."
"Apology not accepted."
"Yeah, whatever. Why are you here, brewing me potions, again?"
"Because the pay is excellent," he said coolly.
"Ah."
Snape cleared his throat and continued his previous thought from where he'd left off. He seemed to be enjoying himself now, oddly. "Whether Potter would be successful in casting any of the Unforgivables is another matter entirely. He probably believes the Light propaganda that it's only possible to cast them from a place of sadism and utter hatred and disregard for the target."
"That's bollocks."
"Yes, but believing the propaganda makes it virtually impossible to cast the curses, because few besides genuine psychopaths are willing to believe themselves capable of those feelings. It's an effective mental block. And also a great way to reinforce the idea that anyone who can cast the curses is irredeemable and worthy of Azkaban."
"Oh... fuck. Merlin, you're right." He suddenly wondered how much James did know about the Unforgivables, whether he had, idiotically, welcomed Sirius back into the house thinking had had been running around casting all three Unforgivables out of genuine murderous intent and sadism. He'd have to ask James later. Moody and Dumbledore didn't seem to think that way, at least not anymore, or they would not have been so understanding this afternoon... He shook his head against the flurry of thoughts.
"Next question. You've discovered a close relative is also a Death Eater. They're higher ranking than you are and joined by choice, so there's no chance you could convince them to just quietly run away and go into hiding. You do have the means to tip the aurors off regarding their next evil assignment though and thus get them sent to Azkaban for life."
"Mmm. Since it's life in Azkaban, I'm assuming the 'evil assignment' is murder?"
"Not necessarily," Sirius answered. "Any of the three Unforgivables earns you a life sentence remember. So can aggravated assault if the Ministry isn't satisfied with the motivation. Or treason even without any kind of violent crime if you upset the wrong people. This relative is Marked, though, so they've killed someone at some point."
"Noted. And by 'close relative' do we mean close by blood or someone James actually knows and likes fairly well?"
Sirius arched an eyebrow. "Both. Does that matter?"
"To Potter, yes, obviously. He'd say no of course, but he's so willing to bend over backwards for you, his morals are clearly more flexible than he thinks. Still, if the job is murder, then I suspect he probably would turn his cousin or whoever in. If it's more like spying on the Ministry or bribing, then he probably would keep it to himself for awhile."
"Interesting." Put that way, neither James nor Dumbledore nor any other individual Sirius had previously regarded as a moral paragon was one. Which should have been obvious much sooner with the bullying and Dumbledore's vague mutterings of the dangers of the Greater Good. It was the ideas of altruism and holding oneself to higher principles that had so impressed him as a student, not the fact of it. The concepts contrasted sharply against the Sacred Families' arrogant obsession with appearances, in theory.
"What did you do?"
"Next question. You're on a mission with another Death Eater who spends the whole time casting Unforgivables at various innocents and looting corpses and bragging about muggles and muggleborns he's killed in the past. You don't have a way to send him to the aurors now or for the foreseeable future. You do have an opportunity where the two of you are cut off from any witnesses, with his back turned, so you could off him and make it look like he lost a duel against someone on the Light side."
"Potter would probably do something stupid like cast Stupefy at the Death Eater and get himself killed," Snape said instantly. "He wouldn't want to acknowledge the reality that this is a no-win scenario with only three outcomes. Either you kill the Death Eater and risk yourself, you do nothing, or you non-lethally attack the Death Eater and subsequently die."
"What would you have done?" Sirius asked curiously.
Snape peered at him. "Nothing." His voice was flat.
"Really?"
"Black, you were by far the most successful spy in the Death Eaters, if not the only spy. Your position was insanely valuable to your cause. On the other hand, your hypothetical Death Eater, while a disgusting individual, was nothing in the grand scheme of things. A loser doomed to fall with the Dark Lord. I'd go so far as to say there was no single Death Eater so valuable to the Dark Lord as you were to the Light side. There were no circumstances where killing a single Death Eater would be worth risking your position. Dimwit."
Sirius eyed him. It was nothing he hadn't thought and been told before, mostly by Portrait Moody while the war was still ongoing, but Snape was so matter-of-fact and articulate about it.
"You have a friend who was a Death Eater. Dementors are his greatest fear ever since the fall of the Dark Lord. He's been caught. He's guilty of many terrible things, and he knows neither you nor anyone else would willingly help him escape justice, so he doesn't ask you to spring him. Instead, he asks you to kill him, out of mercy."
Snape raised an eyebrow. "When did that happen?"
"Hypothetically speaking."
"Doubt it."
"What would James do?" Sirius insisted.
Snape folded his arms. "This one's trickier," he said finally. "It's hard to imagine a scenario where Potter's friend would have done something so awful that Potter would no longer simply try to get him out of prison, but not so awful as to lose all Potter's sympathy. His ethics aren't quite so sloppy as yours seem to be. Before you let loose that dementor at the end of the war and reminded everybody how awful they actually are, I'm confident Potter would have sent his friend to Azkaban so as not to sully his own hands and tarnish his own self-image. Hard to say if his attitude would be sufficiently changed by observing you post-evil-dementor-ritual to override his bias favoring the sanctity of life."
Sirius ignored the latest jibe at his expense. "Well, what would you do?"
"Nothing. War's over. It's not 'my job' any more. He's in Ministry custody, so they can handle it."
"By now, you control three out of five votes on the war crime tribunal," Sirius said. "You can't kid yourself that it's 'the Ministry' sentencing Death Eaters to life in Azkaban. It's you, because you're not stopping it."
"James isn't God, even if he's playing at it," Snape said disdainfully. "If the Death Eater in question is truly so abhorrent as to deserve Azkaban, there would be sufficient political consequences for trying to save him as to lose at least one of the votes James supposedly controls. Unless James was planning on being just as cruelly controlling as the last Dark Lord."
..."Huh."
Snape smirked at him.
"Last question." He hadn't planned on bringing this up, but Snape was proving surprisingly insightful. "War's over. All the worst of the worst Death Eaters have been dealt with, but you have information regarding where to find the last few stragglers bold enough to cling together. They're a mixed bunch - no one particularly violent, no one particularly rich, but they're the sort that don't have opportunities ready and waiting for them post-war. Instead, they're hoping for someone to take Voldemort's place. They want another Dark Lord to rally around, to give them direction and take care of them. So, do you tip off the aurors, knowing some of them are likely to die and the rest go to Azkaban for resisting arrest if nothing else?"
"Or?"
"Or do you meet with them yourself first, hear the stories, talk them down?" He waved a hand. "Take care of them. And only later send the ones who really are in it for the sadism to Crouch to deal with."
"That," Snape said after a moment. "Would be insane. Please tell me this one is actually hypothetical."
"Why is it mad?"
"Oh, let me count the reasons. First thing, it's, again, not your job. You don't owe these wannabe Death Eaters anything."
"Might not owe them, but they would owe me. That's kind of the whole basis of my politics right now."
"Sure, sure. You don't go walking Diagon Alley looking for people to blackmail, though. They come to you. If these haven't or worse are plotting behind your back after accepting alternative agreements with you, they either don't need help or don't deserve it. That's only logical. Furthermore, it's dangerous to go meet an unknown number of possibly crazy and probably violent criminals. Could be a trap."
"Pretty sure it's not a trap. And I'm pretty sure I could take anyone who might try to attack me anyway."
"Only takes one lucky shot from a disgruntled goon who's disappointed you won't be sending him on more bully missions."
"True. Which is why I probably wouldn't lead with that."
"So you, hypothetically, would go meet this mysterious group of Death Eaters looking for a new Dark Lord and, what, pretend to go along with it?"
"At first, yes, perhaps."
Snape rolled his eyes. "Planning to lie about what you're doing doesn't make it better. It just sets you up for getting into more of the same kinds of messy situations. If you want my advice on this one, pick a Ministry partner you trust, and tell him. You can tell him your concerns, too, if you feel you must. I say again: this is not your job. And it shouldn't be, because you would be really, really bad at it."
"Would I?"
"Yes. This entire conversation has proved it. Your ability to deceive is excellent or you wouldn't have survived in the Death Eaters, but your ability make snap decisions is hit-or-miss. You have trouble maintaining objectivity. So you should delegate to others." He glanced at the clock and slid several potions vials towards Sirius. "Hour's up. Take those, and then I suggest you wash the green off of you."
Sirius reached for the first, familiar potion and uncorked it.
"I do still wonder what possessed you to open up to me about this," Snape mused. "The Potters are always complaining you won't talk to them."
"Must be the booze," Sirius said. He was no longer roaring drunk, but his tongue was still loose. "Had stuff on my mind after this weird not-funeral thing with Madeye Moody and Richard and Dumbledore earlier. Supposed to be about 'coping with it all' and 'remembering the dead,' but it was more just... I dunno. Some of it was good. Too much of it was just them trying to make me feel better about everything."
Snape studied him. "Has anyone actually told you, to your face, that you've done anything wrong?"
"To my face? Hmm... Mum did, but she obviously told me off for the wrong things, blood supremacist harpy that she is."
"Why am I not surprised? Bet that annoys you, doesn't it? Being surrounded by yes-men who won't even say 'yes' to what your own instincts are screaming at you."
"Er..."
"You expressed regret over the death of Rodolphus Lestrange before. Was he one of the people you talked about at your thing with the auror today?"
"Er, yeah. Dolph. Rabastan. Rosier. Mulciber. Pretty much everyone I had a hand in killing."
Snape's dark eyes glittered. "Let's stick with Rodolphus. Do you wish things had been different, that you could have spared him?"
"I didn't actually try to kill him."
"But you would have known it was a possibility, setting him up as you did."
Sirius rolled his eyes. "Yeah, sure, I wish he had survived to be chucked in Azkaban instead. There was no happy solution. The war was always going to end badly for somebody. I just made sure the Dark Lord was the loser and that the people I care the most about weren't caught in it."
"I never said you made the wrong decision, Black."
"Then what is the point of this bloody conversation?" he didn't like the way Snape had usurped control of the discourse.
Snape looked him dead in the face. "Killing and hurting people are morally reprehensible acts. I may not know the details, but I know you've done terrible things that, if you are lucky, will haunt you the rest of your life."
"And if I'm unlucky?" Sirius asked, taken aback.
Snape shrugged. "You'll convince yourself they weren't terrible and sleep well every night. And then you'll go on to do more terrible things, because they seem trivial in comparison. You'll become another Dark Lord without even trying."
"Ah. So you think I should mope and moan and hide away the rest of my life, punishing myself for my misdeeds?"
"No. As I said earlier, you weren't wrong in what you did to Rodolphus. Or presumably to Felix Mulciber and Evan Rosier - I knew them both well enough to know what kind of people they were. What you did to Rodolphus was terrible, but it yielded the necessary results."
As Moody had said earlier that day, You can and should still weigh the consequences of what you've done to what might have otherwise been. You should also learn to make peace with what you've done, contradictory as that may seem. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that a necessary decision to kill an innocent to protect your ability to end the war was also harmless. Or for that matter a necessary decision to kill a murderer was harmless to said murderer's friends and family. You're allowed to grieve for the harm done, no matter to whom.
"It's hypocritical." He hadn't said that to Moody, but he'd sure as hell thought it.
"It's not. In my opinion, it's more hypocritical to deny what you're feeling and espouse a creed you don't adhere to. You aren't James Potter. You're also not Rodolphus Lestrange or Alastor Moody. Or me." He smiled thinly. "It only hurts you to pretend otherwise. I learned that lesson well a few years ago. You think I don't regret some of the words that came out of my mouth while we were at school?"
Mudblood. The racist slur floated unsaid between them. "Really not the same."
"No, but if you're waiting to find someone who can sympathize with your exact situation, you'll be waiting forever."
"Oh, goodie."
Snape's eyes narrowed. "You need to put in the work too, Black. Potter and your other friends and allies are struggling to figure you out, but at least they're trying."
"What do you want me to say, Snape? 'I feel bad, but it was all for the greater good, so it's okay. Time to go back to normal and be happy?'"
Snape smiled thinly. "That's probably what Potter wants you to say, except he wants you to mean it. As for what I want..." he gestured carelessly. "I don't really care about your internal turmoil particularly. I only want you to process it so I don't have to keep hearing about it from everyone else. And so you don't fulfill Potter's fears and cause even more trouble."
"Great. Thanks."
"I will say this, before I go. You think killing is evil, but you think it's a necessary evil in wartime. I agree." Sirius raised his eyebrows. Moody was the only one who had admitted that before, but always in couched in context. He always sounded much more guilty when he talked about it. Even guiltier when he, or rather his portrait, was asking Sirius to step up and do the 'unthinkable.' Snape nodded slightly and continued, "I think deep down, a lot of the others do, too. That's not what you have to feel guilty about. But." He leaned forwards, expression gaining a startling intensity. "War's over, Black. Stop killing people and stop acting outside the law unless you want to start another one. Then you really won't deserve all the sympathy you're getting."
Without another word, he calmly collected the empty potions vials, got up, and swept out of the room. Before he could stop himself, Sirius called after him, "Hey, Snape!" He paused in the doorway. "Er, thanks for the... clarity."
Snape nodded and left.
Author's note: I tried actually writing that memorial scene a few times and couldn't make it work, too redundant. Scenes meant to convey awkwardness can be unpleasant to read I find. I may release some of the amusing draft bits in an omake chapter sometime though. In other news, Snape remains a delight to write. I probably could have cut this chapter down more, but I just didn't want to leave out any of the scenery-chewing. Snape's appropriate in this moment because Sirius gets a weird, possibly unhealthy catharsis out of his brutal, sarcastic honesty similar to James, but also because Sirius doesn't ever have to be afraid of disappointing Snape and so can paradoxically afford to be open with him. While he could doubtless talk deeply with James if he wanted to, Sirius trusts unconditional hatred far more than he trusts unconditional love at the moment. Also from the storytelling mechanics side of things, James' emotionality would prevent smooth progression to the philosophical meat. What Sirius actually needs is a real therapist, of course, but the nonexistence of mental healthcare in Harry Potter is basically canon. Mind healers do not qualify as therapists even in this AU - they're more in the diagnosis and prescription management side of things for magically-induced mental damage only.
Other notes: Quintin's Black is a unspecified variety of strong liquor that was apparently seen in the background of some HP media somewhere. Apparently it ages for years in an enchanted copper cauldron. Snape calls his concoction homeopathic because it uses such tiny doses of the active magical ingredients (a few drops of potions) for the amount of solution. Homeopathic medicine functions under the (bonkers) principle that greater dilution potentiates medicinal properties.
Thanks for the reviews!